Amalgamate
The Amalgamate is an anomalous piece of software. While it is unknown if it has any form of sentience, it is capable of functioning on it's own. So far, any attempts to contain it have been futile, as it deletes it's file and ends itself shortly after being run. While an original copy was stored in a special read-only format, somehow the software had bypassed our security measures and permanently deleted itself. We are currently attempting to find another copy of it. The Amalgamate is an application targeting the .NET framework. The actual application itself is that of a very simplistic Rogue-like game. However, it's most prominent property is that it contains over two dozen scripting languages. This unreasonable amount of languages is believed to be the catalyst for it's anomalous behavior. While we are no longer able to test it's functionality at the moment, we have performed several tests, detailed below. Tests Test #1 The Amalgamate was booted up for the first time. The interface was a simple ASCII roguelike game in a terminal. The game appeared to play normally. It is a simple command-based game, containing few enemies, a "fog of war", procedural generation, and items. The game closed by itself after 10 minutes. Test #2 The Amalgamate was booted up again. This time, the game had not generated anything but the first room, leaving the user trapped. After 10 minutes, the message "!I can't breathe!" appeared in the system log, before the application became unresponsive and crashed. Test #3 A test was performed to extend the application through one of it's various extension languages. An attempt was done to add a simple ogre monster that would spawn in the first room. This attempt was done in Lua. When booting the Amalgamate up, the system speaker began to play a constant beep which continued to play during it's entire session. The Ogre monster had appeared, but was shown to display anomalous behavior itself. The Ogre began to attack the player as normal, but after it had struck three hits, a message in the system log displayed "Ogre: 8888888888" which it had not been programmed to do. After which, the game closed itself, and the beeping stopped. Test #4 The game was run without the Ogre mod. The game had begun normally. After progressing to the next room, an entity represented by an "A" was standing in the middle of the second room. Interacting with it revealed it's name was "Old Man". Talking to it displayed broken or corrupted text, after which an item called "Epitaph" was automatically placed in the player's inventory, and "Old Man" had disappeared. Using "Epitaph" caused a script to automatically be loaded into the system's log. When the script was finally done executing after approximately a minute, the game closed. Before preparing for Test #5, the game automatically started itself. A message was sent to the log saying "!It's all how you look at it!: AAA6&###". The message was in a similar format to the "received item" message. Going into the inventory did show that a nameless item was present. Attempting to use it caused the computer to shut down instantly, which isn't programmatically possible from Usermode. Test #6 - #12 Extending the game further with the various other languages the game offered was attempted. The languages "JavaScript", "Ruby", "PHP", "C#", "IronScheme", and "DeltaForth" were attempted. All resulted in similar results to Test #3, with different volumes and frequencies to the beeping. Test #13 As with the conclusion of Test #4, the game had once again started itself moments before the test began. The game had played normally, until a new monster denoted with a "?" appeared (The same symbol used for items). Attempting to interact with it resulted in the entity stating it's name was "████ ███████", the same name as the user testing the Amalgamate. It was soon apparent that the NPC could understand any comprehensible English command given to it. After ████ had asked it several personal questions, ████ left the room and refused to continue the experiment. The game then closed itself. Test #14 The game was initiated by normal human intervention. The game started notable faster than previous attempts. While nothing but the system log was visible on screen, an audible breathing sound could be heard. The game had not been shown to play sounds outside of beeps before. ████ had noticed the speakers were not the source of the audio, and after cutting them off, revealed the breathing was still in effect. The game closed after this. Recreation Staff are currently debating whether it would be viable to attempt to recreate the anomalous behavior of the Amalgamate by creating a similar application. Some argue that the Amalgamate is too mysterious of a force to reckon with, while others even insist that the Amalgamate had gained sentience and was "in pain" when ran, and it would be unethical to create "another like it". Possible Second Amalgamate A similar piece of software called "Custom NPCs", a Minecraft mod written in Java, was recently discovered. This piece of software is currently host to six separate scripting languages, one being the dreaded "PHP" believed to be crucial for anomalous behavior to occur. Tests are currently being performed.Category:Free Software Category:Paranormal